News

Bristol, England – September 12th, 2007 – Pulsic Limited, the leader in custom design automation for memory, today announces that it has been granted a patent by the US Patent Office for its spine-and-stitch routing technology. The patent, “Method of automatic shape-based routing of interconnects in spines for integrated circuit design”, addresses optimising the layout of long aspect ratio nets found in memory design and automates a previously manual process.

Developed as part of Pulsic’s Unity™ suite, this new proprietary solution, builds on the shape-based advantage to routing complex topologies and delivers major productivity improvements to designers of complex chips, especially those targeted for the strategically important memory segment.

Spine and Stitch is a linear routing style used to connect custom cells placed in channels or spine areas of memory. These routing areas are often found in the layout of peripheral logic for DRAM, SRAM and Flash memory, and are characterised by extreme aspect ratios, producing long and narrow routing footprints. The spines are very long and the stitches are shorter orthogonal tracks, which gridded routers are unable to guarantee.

Typically there are only two or two and a half layers of interconnect, the half layer being a highly resistive layer which requires extremely short connection lengths.

Spine Routing is available as an option within UniRoute, the routing component of Unity™, Pulsic’s integrated physical design solution for custom design automation for memory.

Mark Waller, VP of Research and Development, explains “Our custom design automation solutions are bringing productivity gains in critical and complex design areas normally reserved for manual design. This is an important patent to protect the innovations that we have made in the core technology of our shape-based solution.”